ALL THE GOOD PEOPLE I’VE LEFT BEHIND BY JOYCE CAROL OATES
BLACK SPARROW PRESS (HARDBACK), 1979
227 PAGES
Author’s Website
BLURB FROM THE COVER
All The Good People I’ve Left Behind is Joyce Carol Oates’s twelfth collection of short stories. The collection features ten stories including The Leap, The Tryst and Walled City.
EXTRACT
Could escape by way of the window. Could climb out onto the ledge… take hold of one of the vines… shake it to test its strength… rotten? No?… And climb cautiously down the side of the building… slowly, slowly. Four storeys. New unsuspected strength in the fingers. In the muscles of the arms and shoulders. Feet grasping prayer like. Splinters? Thorns? Sudden breaking of the vine? Below, people have gathered to stare. Look! There’s one of them escaping! Escaping her own death! (THE LEAP)
REVIEW
JCO is one of my favorite writers. This is my first time reading All the Good People I’ve Left Behind. I’m working my way through JCO’s back catalog. There’s a lot I haven’t read.
I enjoyed this early collection of JCO’s short fiction. Each of the ten stories was new to me and I read them for the first time. This made a nice change. The last few collections of her stories I’ve read have contained stories I’ve read a few times that have been published in multiple collections. It was nice to read completely brand new stuff. The stories within All the Good People I’ve Left Behind aren’t JCO’s best or worst but lie somewhere between both, a little closer to best. There are recurring characters that appear in more than one story which I thought was a nice touch. Overall this is a strong collection of stories.
RATING
